$40 Million Department of Energy Grant Funds Collaborative Research on Solar Technology

The Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE) has been awarded a Department of Energy grant focused on the production of fuels from sunlight. The Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology is one of the six partner institutions that comprise CHASE. The $40 million grant, over five years, will accelerate fundamental research on solar technology in order to meet the increasing needs for clean and renewable energy sources.

Led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, other CHASE partner institutions include Brookhaven National Laboratory, Emory University, North Carolina State University, and Yale University. The aim of CHASE is to fill gaps in existing knowledge to allow for development of practical artificial photosynthetic systems. Building on previous accomplishments by the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, the nation’s largest research program dedicated to the development of artificial solar fuels generation, the newly funded research will also blend experiment with theory to help establish new design principles for fuels-from-sunlight systems.

“What’s really exciting here is the goal to develop complete systems that take solar energy, CO2, and water all the way to liquid fuels,” says Karen Goldberg, the CHASE institutional coordinator for Penn. “That’s going to involve many different aspects—from materials to capture the light, to stable and reactive catalysts that can work together, to viable ways to attach these catalysts to semiconductor surfaces, and so much more. We will all work on different parts of the process; there are so many people with very different skill sets needed to make this effort successful.” Goldberg is Vagelos Professor in Energy Research and Director of the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology.